For a dog, a smell can be information.
And when my dog was sniffing me, he wasn’t necessarily being strange.
He was investigating.
He was gathering information about the world around him.
But then I wondered something even more interesting:
What could he possibly learn from smelling a person?
The answer was more fascinating than I expected…
Your Dog’s Nose Is Reading a World You Can’t See
Think about what happens when you meet a friend.
You look at their face.
You hear their voice.
You might notice their clothes or whether they’ve been outside.
Your dog doesn’t need any of that.
A dog can pick up information from tiny differences in scent that are completely invisible to us.
That’s one reason dogs naturally investigate people, animals, objects, and places with their noses.
When a dog sniffs your hand, for example, it may encounter a mixture of odors from your skin, your environment, other people or animals you’ve encountered, food, plants, and countless other sources.
